Advocates, New York City lawmakers and Department of Education officials tend to agree that an overcrowded classroom is not a good environment for teaching kids. But several of the city's districts continue to enroll thousands more students than there are seats, causing many schools to resort to using mobile classroom units or trailers to accommodate.
In March, a working group organized by New York City Councilmembers released a report dubbed "Planning to Learn," an assessment and set of policy recommendations to fix public school overcrowding. The report called for the Department of Education expedite the construction of new buildings while making the process for identifying seat need more transparent to the public. Councilmembers have also recently introduced a handful of bills to improve the school construction process.
The report says that in a growing city whose school-age population is expected to rise to 1.34 million by 2030, about half of K through 12 students already attend overcrowded schools. There are currently about 1.1 million children attending New York City public schools. A little less than a third of students have attended classrooms with 30 students or more.
Some school districts face the brunt of overcapacity more than others. Districts in northern Queens and Brooklyn, as well as southeast Brooklyn and the north Bronx are the most overcrowded. Many districts in central Brooklyn, Manhattan and the South Bronx tend to have extra classroom space. The Planning to Learn report also shows that districts with less crowding problems tend to have within their bounds, a higher concentration of charter schools. These publicly funded but privately run schools can admit any studen elligible to enroll in a New York City school and operate independently, outside the oversight of local district authorities.
Cristina Furlong, a parent and activist in Queens School District 24, one of the most overcrowded districts, echoed the view that more community members should have a say in the school siting process. But she said she often already takes it upon herself to look for real estate for new elementary schools and recommend sites to the DOE.
"I don't think the burden of finding new school locations should be on parents," she said.
Many advocates continue remain skeptical that the city will be able to systematically fix overcrowding given current leadership and funding. Leonie Haimson, with the group Class Size Matters, authored a report last fall detailing how nearly all new net seats gained in the last decade were in charter schools.
Haimson said that in order to address some of the systemic problems, education administrators should involve more people from the community when planning to expand the number of school seats in a given area.
"[The DOE and Department of City Planning] had plenty of opportunity to improve their record here and it hasn't happened," Haimson said, calling the school siting, planning and construction process "dysfunctional."
"We need that information given to the city council, posted publicly, given to the community boards and CEC's [Community Education Councils]," she said.
Class Size Matters has also recently filed a lawsuit along with nine parents and the Alliance for Quality Education demanding that the DOE abide by a 2007 state law requiring that class sizes be reduced in all grade levels over five years.
Sometimes schools are overcrowded because they are popular, high-performing, or have a good reputation in the community. That includes the likes of Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the city's "specialized high schools." Still, in a learning environment with thousands of students, it can sometimes be hard for a student to receive individual attention.
At a hearing before the City Council last month, New York City School Construction Authority President Lorraine Grillo said the DOE is investing 6.5 billion dollars in its current capital plan to build facilities to accommodate for nearly 46,000 new seats.
Grillo said education administrators take an "aggressive stance towards growth," planning for enrollment to increase about one to two percent every year across the city.
"We know we have more work to do," she said.